Wednesday, March 30, 2011

We've been reading a few of the suggestions in the forum here and in the new feedback form and wanted to give a few updates on upcoming changes to the site.

1) Karma: Some of you have expressed a desire to easily see how much of which type of Karma users have. We've decided, as a tool for hosts, to split the karma on the project page so you can see the positive/neutral/negative karma each participant has instead of the total number. This leads to the next request.

2) Kicking participants: Some hosts have requested the ability to remove members from their project if they are non-responsive. Although, we feel there is a chance that this tool could be abused, we will be adding this feature soon. We have to prepare some auto-emails. Please note hosts will be required to state why they are removing a participant from the project. This will give the participant information and allow us to make sure people are not being removed for the wrong reasons. We want an open community but also want hosts to have control over their projects.

3) In our feedback form (upper right under "feedback", we've asked you if you think new members should participate in a few projects before being allowed to host one. Right now, it is inconclusive on how members feel about this so - we will be waiting on whether or not we do this.

4) We've heard that some of you hare having trouble joining projects due to a karma bug. Our resident geek is working on it and will have it fixed soon.

5) Hosts in e-mails. We've also saw that some of the hosts would also like to get the e-mail when they send a note to all participants. We will be adding that feature too.

So, in the next week or so there should be a few changes to the site (specifically 1, 4, and 5).

In other news: We are going to be doing a major site upgrade in a month or so to upgrade the back end(all geek stuff) and we have a redesign of the site that will happen about that time. We'll be asking for testers once we get it on the test site. We hope to add a few new features like a site-wide gallery and such to make the site a bit more visual.

We'd like to thank you all for taking this ride with us over the last two years! We are trying to make this community fun for everyone.

One last note, Aelios (our resident geek) and Empress_Dragon are due to have a baby any day. So things might be a little slower than suggested above if the baby comes in the next few days. (We hope!) FaithMarie will still be on alert for the site and we'll be here to answer questions. Keep up the awesome participation!

We also have an Art Forty-Two meet-up page (http://www.meetup.com/Art-Forty-Two-Meetup/) going on so if you are in the Washington area we'd love to see you!